This year an elderly father and later his son passed away leaving the house to out of state relatives. They contacted me to sell the house because in 2015 when the son was previously in the hospital he gave the relatives important paperwork on the house. Among the paperwork was an edition of my Andy’s Patch newsletter, which the relatives kept for the past five years along with everything else. So when the time came to sell they called me! This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and I feel truly honored and blessed when homeowners let their family know they’d like me to sell their homes.
The house was in pretty rough shape. It needs a lot of work but the relatives had some funds to put into the house and decided to invest in several necessities. We put on a new tar and gravel roof with Cascade Roofing which ate up nearly half the budget. Extensive, expensive dry rot damage was about 20% of Cascade’s overall bill. That’s what can happen when you let a roof go, and Cascade is one of the more affordable roofers!
After clearing out the house with the help of www.NextDayCleanup.com we hired Mother Nature’s Cleaning and they thoroughly wiped down everything (surfaces, walls and ceilings) in order to try eradicating a strong smoke smell. After the wipe down they did a smoke decontamination process and still some of the odor remained. So when my painter Michael Christy came through he used a shellac primer to seal the remaining odors into the walls. Even still I can tell there is a faint lingering smoke smell in the son’s bedroom, but it’s gone everywhere else. I know one homeowner who did seven coats of paint before finally getting rid of a smoke smell. Sometimes walls need to come out. Smoking doesn’t just kill people, it leaves it’s mark on properties, often with tar stains on walls and ceilings. One house I sold had a sewing room where a woman would sew and smoke, and the ceiling above the sewing machine had a thick cloud of tar above the machine, which I imagined grew and darkened over the decades.
Of course the carpet and pad had to go. Carpets are notorious for soaking up smoke smells, and it’s something you can’t just shampoo away. I’ve been using Terry McTaggert with Floor Online out of San Rafael for years for most of my flooring needs, and he put a nice new carpet and LVT (liquid vinyl tile) in place of the old carpet and linoleum. The house looks 100% better now. It will look even better later today when my dear friend Elizabeth Green of El Green Design stages the house today. Elizabeth rocks.
Lastly I called Daniel Sandoval who does a lot of the yard maintenance for me. He tamed the mighty jungle in the backyard! I blew it on this project, I really should have taken ‘before’ pictures. It’s amazing what you can do when you hire the right professionals to transform your home. We’ll be coming on the market this Sunday or Monday, 11/1 or 11/2.
I suspect the house will get a lot of attention and go quickly. It’s not perfect by any means and still needs a lot or work. I’m going to be marketing it as an, “Eichler with Limitless Potential”. This morning we’ll be getting a home inspection with Envirovue and a sewer inspection with Charlie Murphy. The pest inspection comes next Wednesday and I’m hopeful that the City of San Rafael resale inspection will happen next week too. There are never any guarantees about the City timeline, but I’m not expecting any permit issues.
There’s a lot that goes into getting a house ready for the market. Next up, professional photos on Saturday including drone footage to highlight the beautiful open hillside behind the house. Then it’s onto the MLS and executing the Coldwell Banker marketing plan. I can’t wait. Due to a lack of inventory and the enormous potential of 404 Nova Albion I think we’ll do very well. Only time will tell and November isn’t typically the hottest month of the year to sell but there are still a lot of buyers out there. I’m sure the right one is just waiting to take the baton on this project.
Will a contractor come in and redo the kitchen and bathrooms then flip it? Or will the next owner be someone who wants to live in the house and do things themselves? The good news is we can appeal to both types of buyers at this point, which should help with our bottom line. Before the work we would have put the house on at $1,000,000. Now we feel good about pricing it at $1,099,000. I’ll let you know how this one goes.